Bernie Sanders: No deportations for longtime residents

“That is old-fashioned racism and we will not tolerate it”, Sanders said. The Senator made his latest campaign promise as a response to a question fielded at an immigration forum organized by The Nation and the pro-immigration advocacy organization Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM). But if Congress doesn’t act, he said he would expand President Barack Obama’s executive actions to defer deportations. He had heard of Sanders, but said he didn’t know much about him.

As reported in Las Vegas Review-Journal, the former governor of Maryland said that he represented a different way of regarding immigration.

Bernie Sanders took his Democratic presidential crusade to the racially numerous outskirts of Las Vegas on Sunday, telling a large crowd gathered at a soccer stadium concerning the struggles of his immigrant dad & pledging to dismantle what he termed “the excessively wasteful $18-million deportation regime”.

“First thing, and most importantly, our goal has got to be to rally the American people to understand the importance of immigration reform”, Sanders said. HE was bringing up that whole list of you not being a lifelong Democrat, being disloyal to President Obama.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders kisses his wife, Jane, at a rally Sunday night in North Las Vegas, Nev. With the next Democratic presidential debate this coming weekend, Sanders will have another chance to convince voters on a mass scale that he has the broad appeal necessary to take on front-runner Hillary Clinton.

The attack by O’Malley on Sanders was bad strategy.

The president’s executive actions in 2012 and 2014 suspended the threat of deportation for children brought to the USA illegally as children (so-called DREAMers) and the undocumented parents of children who were either born in the US or are Lawful Permanent Residents.

Sanders noted his experience serving on the Veterans Affairs Committee and added that Democrats need to sway voters before seeing tangible results.

At the immigration forum, however, O’Malley slammed Sanders and Clinton for being too cautious and accused both of “poll-tested triangulation”.

O’Malley pointed to Sanders’s 2007 comments to Lou Dobbs, then a CNN anchor and now a Fox Business Network personality whose views are controversial among many immigrants.

Victims of domestic violence and unaccompanied minors who came to the US from Central America would be considered a distinct group for purposes of asylum, Sanders said, a policy that could make it easier for them to remain in the U.S. He only recently began assembling a staff in Nevada, although aides said he plans to open 10 field offices in the state in the next couple of weeks.

“I think one has to ask, is this a priority for the two of them because it’s an election year or if it’s because something they truly believe in?” Sanders also needs to up his Latino support. O’Malley said at a press conference, according to the Las Vegas Sunday.